The One Thing a Husband Hides from His Wife

Curious about what he's keeping from you? One married man got caught and comes clean.

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There is a moment in every marriage when husband and wife look into each other's eyes and acknowledge that they don't know quite as much about each other as they thought -- and that now, they know more than they maybe care to.

Upstairs, the kids were tucked in their cribs and sleeping soundly. I diced vegetables for dinner and rambled idly about the minor triumphs and disappointments of my workday. My wife, Lisa, half-listened while working through our mountain of bills, all the while making sympathetic noises at what were, by and large, the appropriate moments. And then there was a pause in our patter.

"What is this charge, 'Suze Randall Photo'?" Lisa asked as she looked at the credit card bill. "It's for $29.95, and this is the second month in a row I've seen the charge." Recognizing a crossroad, I stopped chopping the vegetables. Lisa had asked me a very straightforward question. Therefore, I reasoned that it deserved an equally straightforward answer. This did not calm the spasm that had taken charge of my gut, however.

"Oh, that? That is a subscription for an Internet porn site," I said as matter-of-factly as any grown man, any father of two, could manage after being suddenly transformed in his wife's eyes into a breast-obsessed pubescent.

"Oh," said Lisa, her eyes dropping from mine to the paper in her hand. "$29.95 every month?"

"That's not that bad," I said with mock cheer in my voice, returning to my dicing and what passed as semiregular breathing, explaining, "some sites cost as much as 39, 40 bucks."

The learning curve was steep, but Lisa, true to form, made the ascent in alarmingly good time. She had just discovered the existence of monthly subscriptions to pornographic websites. She had learned that her husband was one such subscriber. She was no longer confused; she was also not exactly angry. Neither was she particularly chatty during dinner.

At the risk of shocking some of the more naive wives in the room, let me just say that it's a given that pornography is a central part of an American man's life. The thing is, most men are just less clumsy than I am. During a night out with the boys, as I merrily relayed the story of my deep embarrassment to the fellas over beers at our local bar, they all begged to know why I hadn't just lied. I won't say I was not tempted, but it was my considered opinion that Lisa knew perfectly well what "Suze Randall Photo" was likely to be -- or could guess. It made no sense to both get busted with my hands in my trousers and caught in a lie about my hands in my trousers.

It's not like I'm not attracted to my wife -- Lisa is both incredibly hot and incredibly cool. If she told me I could never view porn again, I would do what she said. But luckily, Lisa's politics do not incorporate a reflexive loathing of pornography as an attack on womankind. I suppose Lisa sees pornography as an outlet, not evil, not ideal, but necessary, somehow. Nonetheless, she reminded me that we were working to pare down the balance of that particular charge card, and she would prefer to have Suze's episodic charge removed from it. I said that that would be easy enough to do, and we said nothing else about the episode.

I, unfortunately, chose to misread her calm reaction as a tacit acceptance, which prompted me to neglect her request to remove or even redirect the charge. A month went by without incident and I forgot all about my promise -- that is, until two months later, when Lisa stormed into our study, stabbing the air with a credit card bill.

"I thought that we'd agreed," she barked. "This is the third month in a row. It's the only charge on that account, and I'm sick of looking at your and Suze's porno bill!"

I stammered stupidly, said something about having been too busy, but it was worse than hopeless. This was going to hurt. "Suze" was a person in Lisa's mind now. A virtual lover? Lord, I hoped not.

The next morning I canceled the subscription outright. When tempers had calmed and I had assured Lisa that Suze had been banished from the card, we had a conversation about pornography. She asked why I needed to subscribe to sites. My best guess was that what is different is good. I also explained that surfing for free porn (and there is plenty of it) puts you up close and personal with too many sites described as "teen," and that, as a new dad, I could not bear the notion. Subscribing to adult sites guaranteed much more control of the content. We left it at that.

Not that I kicked the habit completely. Soon I moved on to other sites and charged them on busier cards, hoping Lisa wouldn't notice. And for a while, she didn't. Then one evening I noticed that my computer was on and my Web browser open...on the screen right next to what I had believed was a thoroughly well-buried folder in my "favorites" list. I will not repeat the titles of the sites now, but they leave very little to the imagination.

For men, the term "personal computer" has an unintended but central second meaning. I don't know a married man who is not paralyzed with fear whenever he is asked, innocently enough, by his wife if she could please use his computer to log on to the Web to check email or shop. One's computer, especially one's browser, is a deeply personal space -- horribly autobiographical and, often, deeply revealing. If it were up to me, the personal computer would remain just that, and be strictly a "his" and "hers" appliance. I went down to dinner prepared for the worst. Lisa had, she explained over dessert, logged on to my computer, and for some still unknowable reason, my computer had voluntarily coughed up the homepage for every porn site I had ever thought enough of to keep.

Lisa said the deluge was entirely overwhelming and that it took forever to clear the pages just so she could log on to a hardware Website. She was embarrassed to have been caught snooping (if involuntarily, to hear her tell it). Nonetheless, she was concerned. I assured her that I was not subscribing to more than two sites (a lie -- I presently subscribe to three). I said that I was embarrassed also and didn't know what to say to make her feel better. Generously, she chalked this second episode up to bad timing and shrugged it off, but the conversation continued after we both retired to the porch for a big cocktail.

At lunch the next day with an old friend I relayed this second episode, confiding that Lisa was now concerned that I might be a sexaholic.

"A sexaholic? 'Cause of a few dozen porn sites in your favorites list?" he laughed. "You and the rest of the men in America."